I found useful histories on the Red River North Heritage site (warning: the page makes use of the offensive term ‘half-breed’) and the Canada’s First Peoples site. This masterfully written narrative shifts among the intergenerational voices of the women of one extended Indigenous family. In part one, we meet seven characters, mostly members of the Charles/Traverse family: Stella, Emily, Phoenix, Louisa (Lou), Cheryl, Zegwan (Ziggy) and Tommy, one of the police officers who interview Stella. I love the Canada Reads competition so much, because it brings stories like this to a greater audience.

Each chapter is narrated by or told from the perspective of a single character, with links slowly growing between them. I found it very difficult to keep track of all the characters and just when I thought I was getting to know a character the narrative would shift and I would have to try and connect again.

Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg’s North End is exposed. is heavily invested in bibliolatry, its polymorphous protagonists subjected to the occult use of books for divination.

A big thank you to Edelweiss, House of Anansi Press and Katherena Vermette for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review! I thought the author gave a realistic voice to these women as we seen how they coped with the violence and how they healed each other through their love, strength, resilience and kindness. The best part of The Break is the four generations of women who come together in support of the victim(s) of the attack; no personal experiences could ever prepare one person to make sense of such evil and it takes an entire family of damaged individuals to provide healing for all. You try being a little girl’ (she means herself) ‘whose mum is in hospital for months on end with tuberculosis at a time when tuberculosis wasn’t even a thing, when it was years out of date.When Stella thinks it’s the Break that is the problem and says, “Girls don’t get attacked in good neighbourhoods,” Kookom replies, “Girls get attacked everywhere. The novel begins with the witnessing of a sexual assault and the reluctance of the white police officers sent to investigate to believe the Métis woman, Stella, who reports the crime.